I really doubt I'm going to get very far on this post this morning. But I figure, I have to start somewhere. I have the rare luxury of only having 1 child awake & having already consumed 2 cups of coffee. So, with cheerios on his tray to distract Nathan, I will attempt to catch you up on the last 2 & 1/2 months (ok, he's already crying...so this may be the super fast version).
Right after I wrote my post about home, community, roots etc., Paul got a job offer in Redding, CA & we decided to move our growing family to nearby Chico. The night we first considered this possibility, neither of us slept (both kids up now...super super fast version on its way!). We had long since ruled out the possibility of living in Chico after attempting to find a suitable job for Paul in Butte county for some time. And then out of the blue, Paul hears that the Supervisor of the Redding office for the agency for which he works, wants to talk to him about transferring. That night, we lay in bed dreaming about free babysitting, people to hang out with on a Saturday night, familiar (non-chain) restaurants & affordable homes with yards. Within a matter of 2 weeks, it was a surreal reality & we were in Chico house-hunting with a real estate agent. We drove around Chico assessing houses & the pros & cons of various neighborhoods with none of the ambivalence we felt about Sacramento. It makes me wonder if ambivalence, in general, is a sign to stop & reassess. But at the time we were considering Sacramento, it seemed there were no other options. Still, perhaps our ambivalence was telling us to wait; wait until a better alternative appeared.
Three days later, without reservation, we put in an offer on a house on the north end of Chico.
By the way, while we were house-hunting, Isa was having a blast playing at Nana & Grandad's & cousin Santiago's house & of course with Uncle Josh & Aunt Sara's pet bunny, Valentine. It was clear: Isa was "home" already. Nathan slept contentedly in the car while we viewed homes...must have been the chico sunshine lulling him into slumber. For whatever reason, when your kids are happy, it feels like everything will be ok.
The next 4 weeks were a whirlwind. Our offer on the house was accepted, we started packing our rental in Concord & Paul started his new position in Redding on October 1st. We stayed at my parents house during the weekdays while Paul worked & then traveled back to Concord to tie up loose ends on the weekends. By mid-October, all of our stuff was in storage in Chico & we had made my parent's house our temporary home in Chico while we waited for our house to close escrow.
We're still waiting to close on our house, but hoping to see that happen this Friday. Then, we'll paint the new place from top to bottom, put in new floors & move in around December 4th. The journey to find a place to put down roots will have ended & we will begin tending to the soil. Moving to Chico feels like starting from a seedling as opposed to a seed. We have much to be thankful for in terms of people we are connected to & places attached to significant points in our history (my & Paul's first kiss was in Chico after all).
I wish it were as easy to recount the thoughts, feelings & emotions of coming "home" as it is to recall the events & to-do-lists that were formed along the way. That is a gentle reminder to myself to write in the moment, not 2 months after its passed:) But alas, some things, as important as they are, have to wait. I'm grateful that my kids have adjusted well to their new diggs (even though we are about to introduce them to another in a few weeks) & that Paul is happily adjusted to the pace of life in Redding/Chico as opposed to the Bay Area. He says that the Northstate reminds him of home in Minnesota much more than he ever anticipated that it would. No one would believe that California & Minnesota could have much of anything in common...but I guess it does. We're proof, since we are now both calling Chico home.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
I miss you Highland Grill
I can't get the turkey burgers from Highland Grill off of my mind...even though its been 4 months since I've tasted one & before that, it had been nearly a year. Fresh ground turkey, peanuts, jalapenos, onion, garlic and curry seasonings blended together and topped with pepper jack cheese, poblano pesto aioli and iceberg lettuce on a toasted bun. Mmmmmm! I emailed the owner & used all of my charm to try & pry the recipe out of his fingers to no avail. He did reply, a curt little email saying that they don't give out the recipe, but gave no apology for not wanting to share his secret!
Next, I attempted to find a recipe online...didn't find anything that sounded remotely like it.
So I decided to try & recreate the recipe myself.
I sauteed onions, garlic & jalapeno. Mixed them with ground up peanuts, curry powder & ground turkey. Grilled it with pepper jack cheese. The result? Not so great. Not exactly bad. But not at all what I had been tasting in my mind. It needed more peanuts & less curry powder. Perhaps no curry powder at all, but just some cumin? I have a Mediterranean meatball recipe that, minus the peanuts, has a similar taste that calls for toasted cumin seeds. So I could go that route next time.
To try again or just keep it as a perfect little memory in the tasting part of my mind? Not fully decided.
Next, I attempted to find a recipe online...didn't find anything that sounded remotely like it.
So I decided to try & recreate the recipe myself.
I sauteed onions, garlic & jalapeno. Mixed them with ground up peanuts, curry powder & ground turkey. Grilled it with pepper jack cheese. The result? Not so great. Not exactly bad. But not at all what I had been tasting in my mind. It needed more peanuts & less curry powder. Perhaps no curry powder at all, but just some cumin? I have a Mediterranean meatball recipe that, minus the peanuts, has a similar taste that calls for toasted cumin seeds. So I could go that route next time.
To try again or just keep it as a perfect little memory in the tasting part of my mind? Not fully decided.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Home-hunting (part 1)
More than 6 months ago, Paul was given a conditional offer of a job that would involve us moving to Sacramento. Because of the type of job that it is, there's an extremely lengthy background check that has to be passed before the job is officially offered. Things are nearing the end of the background check & so it's beginning to seem more real that we might be moving. I have mixed emotions about a move, in spite of that, we've started looking for a house in Sacramento. Tomorrow, I will see 6 more.
A little over five years ago, I left behind my friends & family to move to Saint Paul, MN to be with the man that I love. We lived there for 4 years & then moved back to CA a year ago last June. Before that, I had hopped around from place to place in the Bay Area & then settled in Chico, CA for three years before I married Paul.
When Paul & I learned that we were expecting our first child, we started thinking more seriously about putting down roots. Paul felt stuck in his job & the hours were terrible for raising a family. I missed my family back in CA & so we decided to look for a way to move out west. It would be 2 years before a position opened up for Paul. In the meantime, our daughter was born & we met a group of new parents through a family education program sponsored by the state of MN. We soon developed friendships with these parents & for the first time since moving to MN, Paul & I felt we had some sort of community around us. We found a faith community that fit us & I met a few people there that I really clicked with as well. I began to waiver in my desire to move back to CA. Saint Paul finally felt like home to me.
After nearly two years of waiting, no jobs had appeared in CA. So we decided to buy a house & just call Saint Paul home indefinitely. We searched online for months, then decided to go out with an agent. We found a home at 897 Hague that we loved & put in an offer. Our offer was accepted & then I went to CA to sing at an event & take our daughter, Isa, to see her family for her first birthday. The inspection of the home revealed quite a bit of issues, but during my trip to CA the tension that I felt between wanting to live in CA & not wanting to leave MN was revealed even more strongly. Paul felt it too & we backed out of the house.
Nine months later, the door opened for us to move to Concord, CA. Amidst the threat of lay offs & furloughs, we decided to take the plunge. We were more than ready to put down roots by this time. So we found a real estate agent to show us around Concord & talked of buying a home. Even with the market being what it is these days, we couldn't find anything in our price range that seemed like a fit. So we decided to look north in Vacaville. We found another agent & spent a day looking at our options before deciding that Vacaville wasn't going to work for us either. So we hunkered down in a home that we rented in Concord to wait it out & see if a job transfer to a more reasonably priced area might be a possibility, all the while, longing more than ever, to just be done & call a place home. In the meantime, we looked at homes to buy in Chico, where my family lives & dreamed of calling Chico home.
Another 6 months passed, and the job offer to move to Sacramento came. Of course it came just as we'd started to feel a little more at home in Concord. Now, the time to move is approaching, though not 100% finalized & I find it difficult to be excited about it. I am going out with a real estate agent to look at homes tomorrow. It's not that I'm not excited to see what there is, its just that it doesn't feel real, maybe, in part, because my true longing has been for community, connectedness & getting to the point where I could feel like I'm planting my little family in fertile soil---and, without sounding trite, you can't buy that. So the house-hunting part of the journey has lost its luster for me. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm above the desire to have walls around me; actually I want extra tall walls like in the homes built around the turn of the century, with just the right colors on them to match my couch & collections of pictures & nick knacks. It's just that I'm surprised how the thing that represented home to me the most used to be a house & now, not so much. It might sound silly, but that realization does kind of impact that type of house that we buy. If community is what we're after, what type of neighborhood do we look for? What type of house? One that's big enough for friends & family to visit? One that has a real neighborhood-y feel? If we moved out here so that Paul could find a job that better suits him & our family life, how much house do we buy so that we don't become a slave to a mortgage? I have a laundry list of about ten other things/questions I'm asking myself as we embark on what feels like the last leg of our journey to "move to CA."
The other day, I read a chapter from a book called Soul Graffiti by Mark Scandrette. At the end of the chapter he asks the reader to identify 5-7 tangible needs & if you have the courage, to turn the list into a prayer. I appreciated the fact that he uses the word courage in connection with prayer because for me, these days, it takes a lot of courage to pray and so mostly I don't. My needs centered around some of what I talked about above--roots, community, a home. A small part of me had the courage to pray for those things, most of me did not. At the heart of my prayer was the desire for wisdom to know how to find what I truly need, not just what I want or think I need, in a home.
Later in the same book, the author quotes a prayer from the Orthodox tradition. The first part goes like this:
Lord, I know not what to ask of You.
You alone know what my true needs are.
You love me more than I myself know how to love.
Help me to see my real needs, which may be hidden from me.
I am grateful that I've been house hunting for over 2 years now. In fact, it was two years ago this week that we put in the offer on that house on Hague Ave in Saint Paul. It has helped me to see what my real needs are.
A little over five years ago, I left behind my friends & family to move to Saint Paul, MN to be with the man that I love. We lived there for 4 years & then moved back to CA a year ago last June. Before that, I had hopped around from place to place in the Bay Area & then settled in Chico, CA for three years before I married Paul.
When Paul & I learned that we were expecting our first child, we started thinking more seriously about putting down roots. Paul felt stuck in his job & the hours were terrible for raising a family. I missed my family back in CA & so we decided to look for a way to move out west. It would be 2 years before a position opened up for Paul. In the meantime, our daughter was born & we met a group of new parents through a family education program sponsored by the state of MN. We soon developed friendships with these parents & for the first time since moving to MN, Paul & I felt we had some sort of community around us. We found a faith community that fit us & I met a few people there that I really clicked with as well. I began to waiver in my desire to move back to CA. Saint Paul finally felt like home to me.
After nearly two years of waiting, no jobs had appeared in CA. So we decided to buy a house & just call Saint Paul home indefinitely. We searched online for months, then decided to go out with an agent. We found a home at 897 Hague that we loved & put in an offer. Our offer was accepted & then I went to CA to sing at an event & take our daughter, Isa, to see her family for her first birthday. The inspection of the home revealed quite a bit of issues, but during my trip to CA the tension that I felt between wanting to live in CA & not wanting to leave MN was revealed even more strongly. Paul felt it too & we backed out of the house.
Nine months later, the door opened for us to move to Concord, CA. Amidst the threat of lay offs & furloughs, we decided to take the plunge. We were more than ready to put down roots by this time. So we found a real estate agent to show us around Concord & talked of buying a home. Even with the market being what it is these days, we couldn't find anything in our price range that seemed like a fit. So we decided to look north in Vacaville. We found another agent & spent a day looking at our options before deciding that Vacaville wasn't going to work for us either. So we hunkered down in a home that we rented in Concord to wait it out & see if a job transfer to a more reasonably priced area might be a possibility, all the while, longing more than ever, to just be done & call a place home. In the meantime, we looked at homes to buy in Chico, where my family lives & dreamed of calling Chico home.
Another 6 months passed, and the job offer to move to Sacramento came. Of course it came just as we'd started to feel a little more at home in Concord. Now, the time to move is approaching, though not 100% finalized & I find it difficult to be excited about it. I am going out with a real estate agent to look at homes tomorrow. It's not that I'm not excited to see what there is, its just that it doesn't feel real, maybe, in part, because my true longing has been for community, connectedness & getting to the point where I could feel like I'm planting my little family in fertile soil---and, without sounding trite, you can't buy that. So the house-hunting part of the journey has lost its luster for me. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm above the desire to have walls around me; actually I want extra tall walls like in the homes built around the turn of the century, with just the right colors on them to match my couch & collections of pictures & nick knacks. It's just that I'm surprised how the thing that represented home to me the most used to be a house & now, not so much. It might sound silly, but that realization does kind of impact that type of house that we buy. If community is what we're after, what type of neighborhood do we look for? What type of house? One that's big enough for friends & family to visit? One that has a real neighborhood-y feel? If we moved out here so that Paul could find a job that better suits him & our family life, how much house do we buy so that we don't become a slave to a mortgage? I have a laundry list of about ten other things/questions I'm asking myself as we embark on what feels like the last leg of our journey to "move to CA."
The other day, I read a chapter from a book called Soul Graffiti by Mark Scandrette. At the end of the chapter he asks the reader to identify 5-7 tangible needs & if you have the courage, to turn the list into a prayer. I appreciated the fact that he uses the word courage in connection with prayer because for me, these days, it takes a lot of courage to pray and so mostly I don't. My needs centered around some of what I talked about above--roots, community, a home. A small part of me had the courage to pray for those things, most of me did not. At the heart of my prayer was the desire for wisdom to know how to find what I truly need, not just what I want or think I need, in a home.
Later in the same book, the author quotes a prayer from the Orthodox tradition. The first part goes like this:
Lord, I know not what to ask of You.
You alone know what my true needs are.
You love me more than I myself know how to love.
Help me to see my real needs, which may be hidden from me.
I am grateful that I've been house hunting for over 2 years now. In fact, it was two years ago this week that we put in the offer on that house on Hague Ave in Saint Paul. It has helped me to see what my real needs are.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Join the Crowd
I've been contemplating starting a blog for some time now. Mostly because I need a creative outlet of sorts & my old habits (playing the piano) don't work so well with two kids sleeping (or when they're awake for that matter..."mommy, can you play the memory game song??") But I also need a place to "think". And since, for any of you that know me, I tend to process out loud, I thought I'd give blogging a try & see if it helps me process some stuff that needs to get processed. So basically, two kind of selfish reasons. If anyone decides to follow along, I hope I can at some point transcend the selfishness & have something to offer you, at least in terms of transparency &/or laughter at my insane ramblings.
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